Saturday, November 3, 2018

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway lost more than $3 billion Friday as Apple's stock headed for its worst day on Wall Street in more than four years.

Apple — poised to post its fifth consecutive week of losses for the first time since 2012 — was last seen down more than 6.9 percent, on track for its worst one-day move since January 2014. The Oracle of Omaha owned more than 250 million shares of the Cupertino, California-based company as reported in Berkshire's latest holdings filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At Friday's low price for Apple of $206.38, Buffett is down $3.99 billion. At current prices midway through the trading day, Buffett las lost $3.7 billion on paper. Apple closed at $222.22 on Thursday before the disappointing report.

Apple's stock sank after the company's iPhone shipments for last quarter fell short of analyst expectations. The company also issued a financial outlook for the rest of the year that underwhelmed some investors. Those factors foiled the company's stronger-than-expected earnings and revenue.

However, Buffett's losses are likely even more painful: he told CNBC at the end of August that he bought more Apple shares since the end of June , when he reported that he bumped his stake up by 5 percent.

"We bought just a little [more]," he said about two months ago on CNBC in an interview with Becky Quick .

Earlier this year, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach $1 trillion in market value. Berkshire Hathaway is the second-largest holder of Apple shares with a stake worth about $52 billion, according to FactSet.

Despite Wall Street's concerns surrounding the iPhone maker's device sales, Buffett has often explained that his love for Apple stems less from short-term financial performance and more from the power of its brand and ecosystem.

"I do not focus on the sales in the next quarter or the next year," he said in August. "I focus on the ... hundreds, hundreds, hundreds millions of people who practically live their lives by it [iPhone]."

He also called the iPhone "enormously underpriced," saying that it's worth far more than the $1,000 Apple charges.

Friday, November 2, 2018

We know what “slow” internet is like: videos buffer, downloads lag and a single page can take forever to appear in its entirety. We wonder whether it’s our browser, our device or the website we’re visiting.

We know what “slow” internet is like: videos buffer, downloads lag and a single page can take forever to appear in its entirety. We wonder whether it’s our browser, our device or the website we’re visiting.

You may suspect your Wi-Fi signal. Wireless networks are notorious for connection problems. So how can you pinpoint the issue?

Your first step is to check your connection speed. Afterward, compare the results of the test to the speed advertised by your internet provider.

How to stop giving excuses!

Do you ever catch yourself making excuses? Do you know you make excuses? I don’t have time; I’m not sure; I can’t change, I don’t know how; I am too old to do this; this won’t work; this is not my cup of tea…etc etc.

You're okay if you geniunely are not interested but most often these kind of excuses are something we give ourselves for our own personal goals. Here's an example.

For 2017 one of my goals was to create videos. Now before this became my goal I thought long and hard about what I can talk about and how the messaging will be etc etc. But it took me almost 11 months to covert that decision into action.

What happened?

The goal was entirely my decision. Nobody had forced me. Nobody put a gun on my head. It was my decision to create videos. But why didn’t I go ahead?

Looking back I realised my WHY to create videos was not big enough. And excuses are how I justified it.

Benjamin Franklin said - He that is good for making excuses, is seldom good for anything else.

Because, excuses are reasons you invent to defend your behaviour or the lack of it. They are the reasons you invent for not taking any actions, for negating responsibility.

And because we make excuses, we often end up not doing things that we actually want to do.

We can get so caught up in making excuses that when they become habital it can lead to creation of mental blocks, becoming judgemental, increased pessimism, paranoia, jealousy and the most difficult of them all - regret.

I never wanted any regret in my life ever so I decided to understand why was it becoming difficult to move ahead with my self set goal. I looked towards understanding the science behind my actions which is to hack into my brain. Here’s what I discovered.

Apparently unless you align your goal to your core value, something you deeply believe in, it cannot become a possibility. Even if you make it possible, you will eventually loose focus and interest in it. This was a revelation to me.

I then asked myself what are my core values - my top value is helping people. My second top value is becoming a better person.

Since values drive actions, if I can align my goal to my value, in this case, create videos to help people and also better myself, my goal can become a reality. This was new and exciting information to me.

Once I understood my values hierarchy and changed my perception, it became easy to take action. I had taken a decision to go for it and within a week, I shot, edited and published my first video

So the point I’m trying to make is if I can’t link what I’m doing to the highest value, then I won’t do it. It is an absolute truth.

If you’re caught up in similar buzz in your head, ask yourself this question - What do I really want but have not been able to take the first step to get it? Do these align with my core values.

Here my assumption is that you’re already aware of what are your top values are. Try to see if it fits your top values. You may have to modify the sentence /phrase etc for the sake of fitting into it.

Know that if it is important to you, I mean really important to you, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find excuses. The choice is yours.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since
1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the
annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens
civilisation.
The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing
consumption of food and resources by the global population is
destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which
human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything
else.
“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF.
“If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be
equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe,
China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”
“This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature,
desperately sad though that is,” he said. “This is actually now
jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it
is our life-support system.”
“We are rapidly running out of time,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a
global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany. “Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do
we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future
on Earth.”

There is this premium food store which was a hop and skip from my office and one of my favorites at that. I was a regular there and picked up almost all my grocery needs from there. So just before my last day at work a week back, I made a quick trip to the store during lunch to take a last dig at picking up some of the things that I have so grown used to. Last dig, because I would no longer be visiting there often. It is a nice and long 75-80 minutes drive from my home.

So while I stocked up my regular breads and pastas and pestos and salad bags, I also picked up some fresh zucchini and asparagus. You don’t get these very easily around the place I live, so it was more like an impulse buy.

Back home, I wanted to use both these and dish out some quick yummy food. I squared down on making two dishes - a Pasta Farfalle with Basil Pesto and a Zucchini & Asparagus Rice.

I will take you guys through the pasta preparation some other time, today let’s quickly check out the Zucchini & Asparagus Rice… its quick, nutritious and of course… yummy!!

So we start with 1 fresh zucchini sliced and halved and about 5 spears of asparagus trimmed and cut into 2 inch pieces.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The plane behind Lion Air's crash off Indonesia was one of Boeing's newest and most advanced jets. It was just two months old and with 800 hours under its belt, so experts are baffled as to what exactly caused the 737 MAX 8 to crash.

While no information has been released yet as to why the brand-new plane crashed into the sea 13 minutes after takeoff, FlightRadar24 has published data that shows the plane behaving erratically during takeoff. When a plane would normally be ascending in the first few minutes of flight, the Lion Air jet experienced a 726-foot drop over 21 seconds.

Aviation expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes told CNN that the data was unusual -- especially since takeoffs like this are typically controlled by the plane's automatic systems.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Before a gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh Saturday morning, he posted a threat to the Jewish community online.

“HIAS
[a Jewish nonprofit organization] likes to bring invaders in that kill
our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw
your optics, I’m going in,” the suspect, Robert D. Bowers, reportedly wrote. Just hours later, he killed at least 10 people and wounded others in what the Anti-Defamation League has declared the deadliest against the Jewish community in the history of the United States.

Bowers didn’t make his anti-Semitic statements on Twitter or Facebook
or even Reddit, but rather on a small social network called Gab. It was
founded in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter and other large social
platforms, and indeed looks and operates similarly to Twitter, allowing
users to follow and reply to one another, and to reshare short status
updates.
But while Twitter, Facebook, and other mainstream social networks abide by ever-evolving sets of community standards, Gab allows users to say pretty much anything they want.
Andrew Torba, the Silicon Valley Trump supporter who created it, said
that he wanted to offer an alternative to mainstream social networks,
which he and others feel are biased against conservatives.

Monday, October 29, 2018

What happened when I tried the U.S. Army’s tactic to fall asleep in two minutes

If you often find yourself having trouble falling sleep, you’re not alone. The American Sleep Association (ASA) says
that 50 million to 70 million U.S. adults have a sleep disorder. Among
that group, insomnia is the most common. The ASA says that 30% of adults
have reported short-term, insomnia-like symptoms, and 10% of American
adults deal with chronic insomnia.

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A major study of 440,000 adults showed that 35% of us get fewer than seven hours of sleep a night. That means there are millions of people at risk of facing serious health problems
that lack of sleep can cause, including obesity, heart disease, and
diabetes. But it’s not just health problems these people have to deal
with.
Lack of sleep is a big problem for your productivity–and for
the company that employs you. A 2015 Harvard study showed the average
worker loses the equivalent of 11 days of productivity every year due to sleep issues. And a 2017 study found that poor sleep cost U.S. businesses a staggering $411 billion in lost productivity every year.
The
recommended amount of sleep an adult needs is between seven and nine
hours each night. But for many, finding this time isn’t the problem–it’s
falling asleep once your head hits the pillow. I’m one of those people
who occasionally has this problem, and in the past have tried everything
from meditation to medication. But for the last four weeks, I tried
something different–and it’s something worth trying if you have sleep
problems.
Recently, an old method used by the U.S. Army to help
soldiers fall to sleep in less than ideal conditions (like battlefields)
has resurfaced. The Independent says the technique was first described in a book from 1981 called Relax and Win: Championship Performance by Lloyd Bud Winter.
In
the book, Winter describes the technique designed by the U.S. Army to
make sure soldiers didn’t make mistakes due to grogginess. The technique
apparently sends you off to sleep within two minutes.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

This glittering ball of stars is the globular cluster NGC 1898, which lies towards the centre of the Large Magellanic Cloud — one of our closest cosmic neighbours. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that hosts an extremely rich population of star clusters, making it an ideal laboratory for investigating star formation.

From R D Fan: Songs of Life

Repeating this post from past: Why RD today ? Neither today is 27th June nor 4th January. But as they say RD was timeless like depicted in the song picturized below or ahead of his times as thought be some.

Songs of Life: Tribute to RD

Lot has been said about genius of RD Burman. There are folklores amongst music lovers about his personality. But I have a different angle to pay tribute to RD. His songs make you reflect upon various situations about life and thus they appeal. Though some might technically and correctly credit major part of that to lyricists but I feel the haunting music facilitates that reflection. Here is my case.

Most of us have some complaints about life thus the most favourite song of mine is applicable universally: ‘Tuzse Naaraz Nahin Zindagi Hairan Hoon Main’. Note the difference between Naaraz (being dejected) and being ‘Hairan’ (bemused). It’s subtle and also note on stress in the music of “Main”. That ‘main’ is what magic of Panchamda does to lyrics. Also note the differentiating nuances of Naaraz and Hairan which go parallel. ‘ Main’ (meaning I) is universal. I am driver of my own life, ambition, my problems, my destiny. So I have all rights either to be naraaz but I am not pessimist so I am hairan (live human will). Isn’t it amazing? Most of us strive hard and get perplexed by life. Some situations add to misery so that you feel “muskurayen to muskurane ke karz utarane honge” ie even if you find small pleasures you have to pay big price for that figuratively.

Life moves on. Being in naraz state of mind leads to the resilience of human mind and this resilience reaches stage where you are content with what you have. Katra katra milti hain. Life is like that. I am enjoying my pain and let me stay where I am. The repetitive echo of asha sound creates magic as if this is an afterthought...

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